I have some questions for dancers. This may demonstrate yet again the truth of Two dancers, three opinions, but I accept that risk. In Stripes, Bill Murray argues that Americans are mongrels, because we are such a mix of ethnicities, and that this makes us stronger. If our Bill is right, dance training in this country should be phenomenal, as I have seen in many places that there is a mixture of methods not just in schools but in individual teachers. My home company and school, Ithaca Ballet and the Ballet Center of Ithaca, is inherently Russian and increasingly Vaganova, which I am pleased about. (I was first shown Vaganova video about a year and a half ago, depicting eight year olds, and had trouble believing they were in their first year of training-- they were phenomenal. And I am now in my second year of the full Vaganova myself and am thrilled with the progress.) I am willing to consider that almost any system can be effective if run at full power, but have also seen the kind of confusion that results from mixing methods. Raise your hand if you have experienced this: you are in a new class with people who have been trained in a number of different national traditions. The teacher calls for third arms and everybody does something different. Do I really HAVE to strike the floor on a frappe? Is it ok if I do quick passes on all but really fast pas de bourres, just for clarity, and is anybody going to object if I point my sternum at the dress circle? But this is getting gassy. Let me go to the questions: At your home school or company, is there a school-wide system, or is there is there a mixture-- Cecchetti with one teacher, RAD with another, SAB with a third? Do your individual teachers pick and choose between various traditions? Do you feel that consistency, sequence, and logic are important in dance training? Or that we are better off experiencing the variety of methods and cherry-picking them? My thinking is that we are entitled to some stumbles, as our ballet tradition is much younger than that of other nations--- our first professional company, San Francisco, dates only to the 1930s-- but it also seems that we are overdue for some consistency.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 23:57:28 +0000